Film like Selections in Photoshop • Better Masks for your Digital Assets by Matt Anderson

This quick tutorial will show you how to make a film like edge on your selection / mask in photoshop. Film has an inherent grain, and if your trying to do some masking or digital asset retouching, a simple blur on a selection line won't cut it.

For our example I'm using a simple textile selection.

Here you can see a quick mask view of the selection, where green denotes the areas selected.

Next I applied a Gaussian blur, radius' of usually 5-10 pixles works well, depending on the size of the transition needed.

Hitting the "tilde"key, you will get a black and white representation of your quick mask selection.

Next we're going to apply the "film" effect to the selection. Goto Filter/Brush Strokes/Spatter

A setting I have foud that works well is a Spray Radius of 4 and a smoothness of 1.If your image has less/more grain/transition needed, feel free to tweak the radius value in conjuction with the prior gaussian blur.

Here is the resulting effect on our blurred selection.

Our next step is to take the edge off the grain, and create a subtle and more realstic film grain. Unless your initial image is overly sharpened, you'll want to soften the grain selection edges to match. Here I have used a value of .3 gaussian blur to take the hard edge off.

Lastly, hit Q for quick mask again, this will show the "crawling ants" selection, and proceed to save your alpha / mask.